Visiting Scholars

Diana Khoi Nguyen, Poetry Reading

Thursday, February 13th, 5:30 PM, ARTS Recital Hall (ARTS 150)

*This talk is sponsored by the Chico State Women's Philanthropy Council(opens in new window), Writer's Voice, Northern California Writing Project, and the Asian & Pacific Islander Council.

(Photo credit by Karen Lue.)

Diana Khoi Nguyen will also be having a craft talk on Thursday, February 13th, 2:00 PM, AYRS 120.

What is an image, and what can text entail? We will pay close attention to the nuances of these two words before excavating how they have been employed and evolved on the page over time. We will expand our original notions of these two crucial media, and how they can engage with each other. What happens at the intersection of image and text in creative work?

Poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of two poetry collections, Root Fractures (Scribner, 2024) and Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize. She is also the author of the chaplet Unless (Belladonna*, 2019), which received the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her video work has recently been exhibited at the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Justin McDaniel, "Affixing Gold to Ghosts: Corpses, Funerary Cultures, and Horror in Buddhist Southeast Asia"

Thursday, March 6th, 6:00 PM (new time!), Ruth Rowland-Taylor Recital Hall, PAC 134

Westerners often regard Buddhism as a religion of peace, meditation, and compassion. While this is often true, it ignores the horrific and phantasmagoric side of many Buddhist rituals and beliefs. Those include practices such as meditating on corpses, strolling through giant Hell Gardens filled with terrifying images, and telling stories about haunting and highly sexualized ghosts. It’s no wonder that Buddhist countries produce some of the most violent horror films in the world. This talk will look at the ways in which Buddhists embrace the macabre and what we can learn from ghost belief in Buddhism more broadly.

Justin McDaniel earned his PhD from Harvard University in Sanskrit and Indian Studies. His research foci include Lao, Thai, Pali and Sanskrit literature, art and architecture, and manuscript studies. His first book, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, won the Harry Benda Prize. His second book, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk, won the Kahin Prize. His third book, Architects of Buddhist Leisure, was supported by grants from the NEH and Kyoto University. His latest books include: Wayward Distractions: Studies in Thai Buddhism (National University of Singapore and Kyoto University Presses) and Cosmologies and Biologies: Siamese Illuminated Manuscripts (Holberton). His forthcoming book on humanities education in the modern academy is called, This Will Destroy You. He also has published edited volumes on Asian Manuscripts and Material Culture, Buddhist Biographies, Buddhist Art, Buddhist Ritual, Buddhist Literature. He has published over 100 articles and book reviews on a wide variety of subjects in Buddhist Studies, Material Culture, and Religious Studies. He also has forthcoming work on the study of Human Flourishing and the Discipline of Religious Studies. He has received grants from the NEH, Mellon, Rockefeller, Fulbright, PACRIM, Luce, the SSRC, among others. He is the co-editor of the journals: Buddhism Compass, Journal of Lao Studies, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He has won teaching and advising awards at Harvard U, Ohio U, the University of California, and the Ludwig Prize for Teaching at Penn. He was named one of the top ten most innovative professors in America by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019 and his work on pedagogical methods in the controversial courses Existential Despair and Living Deliberately have been featured on NPR, Huffington Post, Washington Post, and many other venues. In 2012 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2014 a fellow of Kyoto University's Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His forthcoming work includes edited books on Thai Manuscripts, Buddhist Biographies, and Buddhist ritual. He has presented public and scholarly talks in over twenty different countries. He welcomes student and research questions on these subjects and sundry. 

Earlier this year... 

Megan Corbin, "Haunted Objects: Spectral Testimony and the Role of the Material in Remembering the Traumatic Past"

Thursday, October 17th, 5:30 PM, Zoom

*This talk is sponsored by the Chico State Women's Philanthropy Council(opens in new window).

How can the material world help survivors of trauma narrate their experiences? How can an object stand in for the lost subject and create meaning? How does the surviving subject’s relationship to the material world shift during their “limit experience”? And how can this changed relationship be communicated to others and to the future? Drawing from the research presented in her book Haunted Objects: Spectral Testimony in the Southern Cone Post-dictatorship, this talk explores these questions through examining the cultural production of survivors of the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay in the second-half of the twentieth century. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural analysis that combines theory from Testimonial Studies, Holocaust Studies, Material Culture Studies, Memory Studies, Trauma Theory, Spectral Theory, and Museum Theory, Corbin offers the concept of “spectral testimony” as a theoretical framework for creating a scene of witnessing through objects that is capable of fostering empathy and understanding, contributing to the Southern Cone Human Rights Community’s pleas for Truth, Memory, and Justice for the past.

Megan Corbin is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She is Editor of the critical literary journal College Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Managing Editor of the book series Hispanic Issues (Vanderbilt University Press). Her research examines the cultural production of the Southern Cone Post-dictatorship period, with a specific emphasis on testimonial writing and material cultural studies.

Mari N. Crabtree, "The Past that Stalks Us: The Black South, Haunting, and the Ghosts of Lynching"

Thursday, November 7th, 5:30 PM, Zoom

*This talk is sponsored by the Chico State Women's Philanthropy Council(opens in new window).

Long after lynch mobs dispersed, memories of the violence and horror lingered. They lingered around the sites of lynchings themselves, in the ghost stories and family lore told among Black southern families, and in traumatic reverberations felt both consciously and subconsciously by Black survivors of lynching. Black southerners found a measure of justice in tales of the supernatural—vengeful ghosts, deathbed confessions, divine retribution, and even a destructive tornado. These stories enabled Black communities to process and condemn local lynchings, but via an act of God or an angry ghost, rather than a direct expression of their criticism. For some, lynchings literally haunted them, leaving them to struggle with traumatic memories they could not shake. In this talk, Mari N. Crabtree explores the myriad ways in which haunting provides a generative lens for understanding how the past often stalks around the present but also how Black southerners lived through and beyond the trauma of lynching. 

Mari N. Crabtree is an associate professor of African American and Africana Studies and History at Emerson College in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. An interdisciplinary scholar, her research blends Black studies, cultural studies, history, and literature. Her book, My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching, was published in 2022 by Yale University Press as part of the New Directions in Narrative History series. She also has published essays in Raritan, Rethinking History, Contemporaries, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. Currently, she is working on a book of essays titled “Co-Opted: Essays on Black Studies and Ethical Praxis in the Age of Neoliberalism” and a monograph on the pleasures and political utility of guile, deception, and humor in the African American cultural tradition titled “Guile: The Pleasures and Political Utility of Subversion in the African American Cultural Tradition.” Before joining the faculty at Emerson College, she taught African American Studies at the College of Charleston and was a visiting research scholar with Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies.